Author: Shashi Deshpande
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 344
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0670057819
Description
A father who delights in the human body, its mysteries, its passion, and the knowledge that it contains and conceals. A mother who wields the power of her love mercilessly. A sister separated in childhood. An uncle who plays games of life and death as a member of the Bombay underworld. A passionate love affair that tears the family apart. And a young woman left to make sense of the world and of her own sexuality. Shashi Deshpande's new novel is about the secret lives of men and women who love, hate, plot and debate with an intensity that will absorb every reader.
It is a story that begins, conventionally enough, with a woman's discovery of her father's diary. As Manjari unlocks the past through its pages, rescuing old memories and recasting events and responses, the present makes its own demands: a rebellious daughter, devious property sharks and a lover who threatens to throw her life out of gear again. The ensuing struggle to reconcile nostalgia with reality and the fire of the body with the desire for companionship races to an unexpected resolution, twisting and turning through complex emotional landscapes.
With her uncanny insight into the nature of human relationships and an equally unerring eye for detail. Shashi Deshpande ventures further than she ever has into the terrain of the mind, teasing out the nuances and exloding the stereotypes of familial bonds.
REVIEW
SHASHI DESHPANDE'S novels are extraordinary attempts at exploring the essential aloneness of an individual while simultaneously celebrating the amorphous entity called family, which can by turns be claustrophobic and supportive, her special valued lies in an uncompromising toughness, in her attempts to do what has never been attempted in English, her insistence on being read on her own terms and a refusal to be packaged according to the demands of the market.
-Meenakshi Mukherjee in The Hindu.
Contents
Baba's Diary
Mr. Bones
Family Stories
Baba's Diary
A Happy Utopia
Following our Destinies
Baba's Diary
My Mother was a Writer
Property Matters
The Ampersand
In Control
Love and Marriage
Baba's Diary
New Directions
Baba's Diary
The Dream
The Sea
Revelations
Baba's Diary
Good Fairies and Bad
The Flowering
Baba's Diary
The Right Word